Email Designer Panel Overview

SharpSpring's Email Designer lets you create professional emails using drag-and-drop functionality, allowing you to push the limits of your creativity. This article will provide an overview of the Email Designer feature panel that is located at the left side of every email in SharpSpring.

Send Settings

The Send Settings menu allows you to edit the email's general settings. The settings are as follows:

Available Settings

Description

Subject

The email's subject title.

From Name

The name of the person sending the email.

From Email

The email address of the person sending the email.

Reply-To-Email

The email address that any replies will be sent to. Uses the From Email address by default.

In addition, the Send Settings menu offers more technical options. These are presented in the form of checkboxes. When checked, these options do the following:

•The Can Send Multiple Times to One Person option allows the email to be sent repeatedly to the same person or list. When left unchecked, duplicate emails are suppressed.

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•TheMake Available as a Smart Mail in Contact Manager option turns this email into a Smart Mail.

•The Send from Lead Owner When Sending from Automation Engine option will send the email from the user designated owner of the lead.

•The Include View in Browser Link option allows the recipient to view the email in their browser.

Content and Layout

The Content and Layout button allows you to access the drag-and-drop function of the email designer. Themed layouts, simple content blocks, and individual content elements are all able to be placed into an email.

Layouts in the Themed tab are prebuilt sections that are used to hold various content blocks.

Content blocks in the Simple tab are premade text or image sections that can be dragged and dropped into layout sections in the email designer.

Items in the Elements tab are, as the name implies, the basic elements that make up a content block. These elements are buttons, text blocks, and images.

Important: The Themed tab and prebuilt layouts are available only in Designer emails.

Important: Currently, due to how Microsoft Outlook renders emails, two-column layout email templates with an image and text will flip the layout of their renders when sent to clients.

Attachments

The Attachments button allows you to add email file attachments to the email. Attached files are limited to those files uploaded to SharpSpring. There is a limit of four attachments per email.

Attachments can be a great supplement to an email. However, they should only be a supplement. Large attachments can intimidate potential leads, so send one or two small attachments. That said, you should never send an email with just an attachment and no content in the body. Those emails will most likely enter the recipient's spam folder.

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SharpSpring allows you to upload several different file types as attachments. SharpSpring supports the following file types:

.CSV

.DOC

.DOCX

.GIF

.ICS

.JPG

.JPEG

.PDF

.PNG

.TXT

.XLS

.XLSX

.ZIP

The safest file types to send are .GIF, .JPG, .PDF, and .PNG. While SharpSpring supports their attachment, .ZIP files should never be included as attachments in an email.

Theme Styles

The Theme Styles button allows you to modify the various color and text style settings for the email.

You can edit the following style settings:

Primary font

Secondary font

Header background color

Content background color

Footer background color

Email background color

Heading color

Text color

Link color

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The email designer takes any of the styles in the HTML for Email Standard Styles, pulls them into the database, and removes them from the HTML. Do not be alarmed when these styles are removed from the HTML in the View Code mode.

The email designer will look at the first <style> element in the <head> of the HTML and find the CSS for the relevant classes. If the styles are transparent, that means the color is not in the database. It is either in the email’s standard styles or in the head of the email. If that happens, the color will be set in the database. Though it no longer shows in the head, it will appear.

Use these styles to ensure that your desired global styles are brought in by the email designer. If you make a template outside the SharpSpring application and import it, you will need to put styles in the head.

RSS Subscription

The RSS Subscription button allows you to set up periodic emails. These emails will be sent out with a certain frequency, based on new publications on your site.

When sending RSS emails, you will need to determine the following:

The RSS feed URL

A frequency level for how often to send emails

The list to send to

The number of posts to display

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Like the Content and Layout features, you can drag-and-drop the RSS layout widget into emails.

Shopping Cart Abandonment

The Shopping Cart Abandonment button allows you to send out emails containing information on shopping cart transactions that were never completed. This feature is available only after you have integrated the shopping cart on the site to be used for abandonment emails.

Like the Content and Layout features, the abandonment can be dragged-and-dropped into emails.

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Plain Text Settings

The Plain Text Settings button allows you to modify the displayed content of an email when it is sent as plain text.

The available modifiable options are for the email's name and description.

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Preview

The Preview button allows you to preview your email across different platforms.

You can preview how the email looks on a desktop monitor, on a tablet, and on a smartphone.

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Dynamic Content Rules

The Dynamic Content Rules button allows you to set a persona and dynamic rules to an email.

Personas and dynamic content allow you to personalize emails, which result in drastically higher transaction rates.